Advanced Regression for Causal Inference

IS 5150/6110

Who am I?

  • Studied journalism, international relations, and statistics
  • Studied international political economy
  • Worked in marketing research
  • Studied quantitative marketing
  • Eight years teaching at BYU
  • Second semester teaching at Utah State
  • Rachel teaches high school English
  • Four kids aged 7 to 17
  • Once compared by a student to “a nerdy Spider-Man villain”

Who are you?

  1. What program are you in? (Are you taking this course as a capstone?)
  2. Why are you interested in causal inference?
  3. What’s your dream job?
  4. What’s one unique thing about you?

What is this class?

  • Correlation isn’t causation
  • Lack of correlation isn’t lack of causation
  • All supervised models predict, some are interpretable, fewer still are causal
  • A causal (not “casual”) model is needed for intervention and counterfactuals
  • Experimental and observational data
  • Project-based to build a portfolio
  • Proposed a form of this class a year ago
  • Updated proposal with new data
  • Class size lets us run a seminar

github.com/marcdotson/causal-inference